Night Shift

We spend a day visiting a Brick kiln at the edge of the city of Pune, where an educational project funded by Karuna is providing fresh hope for child labourers and their families

It’s 4.00am; the sky is dotted with stars. A group of children and their parents are hard at work by flickering candle light; their breath misting in the cold morning air. The site is a patch of waste ground just off the Mumbai- Pune Highway. The children are crouching down shovelling handfuls of wet clay into metal brick moulds which their parents take and lay out in neat rows. Their hands and clothes are caked in muddy clay.

We stop to talk to a young girl called Purnima. She is fourteen years old and tells us she has never been to school. The air is sharp and, as she talks her, voice is punctuated by coughs. “She can’t go to school”. Her father says curtly “We need her to stay here and work.” In the background the trucks roar by, carrying goods to the shopping centres of Mumbai- a reminder of another India that is fast leaving these people behind.

The people here come from Solapur district, a remote rural area of Maharashtra. Most are landless labourers, forced by drought to leave their homes and come to the city in search of work. They are economic refugees and their desperation makes them easy targets for exploitation. Many become bonded labourers, living in the brick kilns and working for minimal wages to pay off mounting debts. They get 200 rupees for a thousand bricks; the equivalent of £2.70 for a day’s back-breaking manual labour. It is barely enough to survive on and with wages so low parents come under tremendous pressure to put their children to work.

For many of these children hope has come in the form of a project which gives them support and encouragement to get back into school.

Vilas and Kalindar are proud that their daughters Maya and Mandodhari have been in school for three years .They are keen to support the girls’ education even though it means sacrificing some of the extra income they could have helped generate. They see it as a way out- a chance to enjoy the "better life" they have always longed for but that has been always out of reach.

Dawn breaks over the brick kilns. The girls go back to the family’s small hut to get ready for school. A few minutes later they re-emerge transformed; their filthy work clothes replaced by freshly washed school uniforms.

For the moment the stigma of the kilns has been washed away - they could be any “normal” Indian girls, making their way to school.

Later that Day the girls return and spend a few more hours helping their parents carry the bricks to the kiln for firing. The kiln owner comes over to check us out. The project workers are suddenly on their guard. It is a complex relationship; they need the support of the kiln owners to be able to carry on running the project. At the same time they want to put pressure on them to pay decent wages, so the children no longer have to work.

We visit one of the kindergartens and see the children playing games. It is a common enough sight, but these basic facilities represent a lifeline, giving back the semblance of a normal childhood. Life is still extremely tough for these children, but now many of them are doing well at school and can start to look towards a future in which there are at least some choices.

I ask one of the project workers whether there is a danger that by doing this work they might be helping to perpetuate the practice of child labour. She explains that the work on the ground is part of a wider program to help protect vulnerable children; their organisation also campaigns for better legislation to outlaw child labour and secure better wages for migrant labourers. “Meantime we have to deal with the situation as it is and that means getting these kids back into school”.

The project team have been working in these kiln sites for eight years. Trying to persuade parents to enrol the children into school, and running kindergartens and extra study classes to help stop the children dropping out.

“We don’t have great hopes for our own future.” Says Vilas. “We just want to be able to go back home to our village. But we want the girls to have the happy life we never had.”

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